But behind her laughter she was not the same person she had been before her marriage. There were times when Toby caught a look of pensiveness in her eyes. Certainly the old Serena would never have taken her job with Rupert seriously, and not even Rupert had expected her to remain once the initial novelty of being a working girl had worn off.
Her reunion with Lance had been surprisingly easy. He had strolled carelessly into the Chelsea house, his hands in his jeans pockets, his negligent stance and the way he held himself reminding her so much of Kyle that her throat had ached.
‘Sorry for being such a stupid fucker,’ he had said with a sheepish grin. ‘I was a bit over the top, wasn’t I? Am I forgiven?’
‘Oh, Lance, you are a fool!’ she had said, walking quickly toward him and hugging him tight, too relieved that everything was once again normal between them to feel angry or bitter.
At the start of the New Year the long-expected divorce papers were served on her, and she was intrigued to discover that the grounds on which Kyle was seeking the divorce were desertion on her part. There was no mention of adultery. No mention of incest. The papers only needed her signature, but she stared down at them for several minutes and then put them, unsigned, in her bureau drawer.
Through February and March she didn’t hear a word from Kyle or his lawyers. It was as if he were too involved in his new life to pay enough attention to free himself from her.
‘Where is he now?’ she had asked her father. ‘Still at that revolting-sounding training camp?’
The earl, who was still in contact with Royd, said, ‘No, he’s just finished his primary flight training at Fort Wolter and now he’s at a place called Rucker, or Pucker, or something similar, in Alabama. He’ll be there for another three months.’
‘And after that he’ll go to Vietnam?’
‘Yes,’ her father replied, looking at her over the top of his glasses in a way that made her deeply uncomfortable. ‘After that he’ll be in Vietnam.’
At the end of March, 4,400 protestors marched in New York City in an antiwar demonstration. In April Lance was arrested when a demonstration outside the Embassy in London had broken up in wild disorder, May he was arrested again. The war had become impossible to ignore. It dominated the front pages of both national and regional newspapers, and every evening the television news was full of scenes of bombing and carnage, carnage that Kyle would soon be experiencing firsthand. At the beginning of June, Serena told Rupert, ‘I think I may take off for a week or two. You’ll be able to manage if I do, won’t you?’
Rupert raised an eyebrow slightly. He rarely set foot in the shop now. Serena handled both sales and buying with such cool panache that he’d left the shop completely to her. They had also begun to sleep together on an increasingly regular basis, and he wondered if she would invite him to accompany her wherever it was she intended to go.
‘Yes, sweetie,’ he said, and then, as the expected invitation wasn’t forthcoming, he added, ‘Where will you go? France? Italy?’
‘Alabama,’ Serena said, enjoying his look of stunned surprise. ‘To attend to some unfinished business.’
She booked herself into a hotel in Daleville, which was the closest town to the army base. She had brought the divorce papers with her, signed. If he refused to see her, then she would mail them to his lawyers. But she hoped passionately that he would not refuse.
Contacting Kyle had been difficult. The first morning she had telephoned the base and asked to speak to Mr Kyle Anderson.
‘This is the army, ma’am,’ a voice had said dryly. ‘We have lieutenants and warrant officers, but we don’t have misters.’
‘Well, he’ll hardly be a lieutenant,’ Serena said tightly, ‘he joined the army only ten months ago.’
‘Then it wouldn’t be likely, ma’am, would it? May I ask if you are a wife or a girlfriend?’
‘Wife,’ Serena said succinctly.
It took over half an hour before she was finally told that Warrant Officer Anderson had been contacted and another ten minutes before she heard his voice on the other end of the line.
Shock rippled through her. She had thought herself completely in control of the situation, but at the sound of his voice she knew that where Kyle was concerned, she would never be completely in control.
‘Hello there, Warrant Officer,’ she said, adopting an exaggeratedly careless tone in order to mask the nervousness she was feeling. ‘I was just passing through Alabama and wondered if you’d like to help me break my journey.’
There was a long silence at the other end of the line, during which she died a thousand deaths. Then, to her overwhelming relief, he said, a slight hint of amusement in his voice, ‘No one passes through Alabama on their way to anywhere. What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve told you, I’m just passing through.’
‘On the week I’m due to leave for ’Nam? A bit coincidental, don’t you think?’
Serena felt suddenly sick. ‘I didn’t know you were due to leave so soon. When do you go?’
‘Thursday.’
‘Oh!’ She gripped the telephone receiver tightly. Today was Monday, or was it Tuesday? She wasn’t sure. Transatlantic flights always confused her timewise. ‘Does that mean you won’t be able to see me?’
This time the silence at the other end of the telephone stretched out. ‘I hadn’t planned on seeing you ever again,’ he said at last. This time there was no amusement in his voice.
‘Nor me you,’ Serena snapped. ‘But ’Nam is ’Nam, and a wife is a wife, and I rather fancied the idea of bidding the warrior good-bye. With your shield or on it, and all that.’
‘You mean that the thought of my perhaps not coming back would be a sexual turn-on for you?’ he asked with curiosity.
‘No! That isn’t what I meant at all!’ She was so indignant that her pose of careless indifference slipped, and before she could stop herself she was saying, ‘I’ve missed you, goddammit! I want to sleep with you again!’
‘Then why didn’t you say so?’ This time ail the old amusement was back, and though she couldn’t see him she knew that his eyes were full of laughter and that his mouth was crooked in a smile. ‘You called just as I was about to leave camp on a twenty-four-hour pass. Where do you suggest we spend it?’
‘Here,’ Serena said promptly. ‘In bed.’
‘Where’s here?’
‘The Daleview Motel.’
‘Okay,’ he said with military efficiency. ‘I’ll be there in forty minutes.’
He was with her in thirty-five. When she opened the door of her room she gasped, her eyes widening. He was in uniform, warrant officer bars and silver wings emblazoning his immaculately cut jacket, his cap worn at a rakish angle. ‘Kyle! My God! You look incredible!’ She wanted him so much she could barely stand.
Hot, electric-blue eyes met hers, the lazy grin that turned her heart over touching the corners of his mouth. ‘You’re looking pretty good yourself,’ he said, and as he moved forwards to enter the room she stepped towards him, her arms slipping up and around his neck.
His arms closed around her, both the rift and the hideous reason for it temporarily forgotten. God, but she was beautiful he thought. He had forgotten how beautiful. She reminded him of a picture he had seen in a gallery somewhere. It had been of Diana the Huntress, and she had been tall and beautifully boned and splendidly half naked with a look of fearless, wanton daring in her eyes. It was a look he had never seen in the eyes of a flesh and blood woman. Until he had met Serena.
His hands slid down, cupping her buttocks, pressing her in against the rocklike bulge in his pants. She had more style in her little finger than other women had in their entire bodies, and he wasn’t going to forgo the pleasure of this unexpected reunion, no matter how loud the voice of common sense yelled that he should.
‘Oh, Kyle, I’ve missed you!’ Her voice was low and husky, breaking with need. ‘I’ve missed the sight and smell and the taste of you!’
‘How the hell do I
smell? You make me sound like a hog,’ he said as he lifted her off her feet, striding towards the large double bed in the room.
She giggled throatily, her mouth on his neck, her tongue licking and tasting. ‘You smell of soap and sun-ripened lemons and newly baked bread, and you taste … Oh, God!’ Her teeth gently bit his flesh. ‘You taste wonderful!’
‘Let me taste you,’ he said thickly, lowering her to the bed, pushing her brief skirt waist high.
She trembled in delicious anticipation, closing her eyes, winding her fingers through the black silkiness of his hair. She had been faithless scores of times over the past ten months but never once had she experienced the total abandonment that Kyle aroused in her. He confounded her with desire. Convulsed her. Crucified her.
‘I love you, Kyle,’ she whispered in shocked acceptance of the truth. ‘Love you! Love you! Love you!’
Afterwards, their bodies slaked and sheened with sweat, he leaned against the pillows and said, as if their lovemaking had not taken place, ‘Have you signed the divorce papers yet?’
She had been lying beside him, her head resting on the taut flatness of his stomach, her arm flung across his hips. She moved slowly, pushing herself into a sitting position, her hair spilling down over her firm, high breasts. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I will if you want me to.’
He was looking at her through half-closed lids, remembering. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think it would be best, don’t you?’
She pushed her hair back over her shoulder and said hesitantly, ‘You were wrong in what you thought, Kyle. There has never been anything unnatural in my relationship with Lance. What you walked in on was an isolated occurrence. And one that I was not a willing partner to.’
He swung his legs from the bed, walking in splendid nakedness to his discarded jacket, searching in the pockets for cigarettes and a lighter. It was a subject he had vowed not to raise. He had seen what he had seen and he had no desire to have his feelings of revulsion reawakened by useless protestations of innocence. He found his cigarettes and tossed one across to her. ‘You weren’t exactly crying “Rape” or “Help me!” were you?’
‘No, but I had been crying out for him to stop,’ Serena said, the throb of truth in her voice. ‘And he had stopped. He had come to his senses and he was desperately sorry and ashamed of what had happened and I was comforting him. That was when you walked in on us.’
‘Christ! How could you comfort a pervert?’ Kyle spat out, lighting his cigarette and drawing hard on it. ‘He’s your brother, for Christ’s sake! How could you even bear to let him touch you after what he had done and tried to do?’
Serena’s eyes held his, crystal clear and utterly without guile. ‘Because I love him. Not in the way that you assumed. I love him because up till then he’d been the most important person in my life. I love him because in some way that I can’t explain there’s something vulnerable about him, something that arouses my protective instincts. He doesn’t like you and he never will, and he was shocked and distressed by our marriage. What happened between us in the nursery was as much a storm of anger on his part as it was forbidden passion. He apologized to me the very next time he saw me. It was a crazy incident that has been forgotten. I’d like it to be forgotten between us as well.’
Evening sunlight seeped through the drapes into the room. Her fragile-boned, beautiful face was sombre, her hair tumbling down to her waist like a golden, silken curtain. He wanted to believe her. Hell, he almost did believe her.
‘If you’re telling me the truth, why didn’t you write me, telephone me, get in touch with me?’
‘Would you have listened to me if I had?’
‘No,’ he said honestly. ‘No, I wouldn’t.’
‘But you believe me now?’
Her eyes held his in perfect steadiness. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘Yes, I believe you.’
A wide smile curved her mouth. ‘Then put your cigarette out,’ she said, sliding voluptuously down the pillows on to her back, one leg bent at the knee, the other sprawling wide, ‘and come and make up for a stupidly wasted ten months!’
He had done as she had bid, and divorce had not been mentioned again. Four days later, as she sat aboard a plane, bracing herself for takeoff, she opened her handbag in search of a mint and found instead the divorce papers in their battered envelope.
She took them out of her bag, looking at them as the plane screamed down the runway and began to climb.
Kyle would be aboard a troop carrier heading west toward Vietnam. She pressed the tips of two fingers to her mouth, blowing a small, loving kiss in the direction that she fondly imagined the Pacific to lie, and then she tore the envelope in half and in half again and again, letting the small pieces of paper flutter down on to her lap like so many pieces of confetti.
Chapter Ten
For a long time Gavin could only stare into Gabrielle’s radiant, glowing face.
‘A baby?’ he said at last, desperately playing for time. Christ. What was he going to say to her? What in hell was he going to do?
‘Oui, mon amour.’ She slid her hand into his, squeezing it tight. ‘I have had my suspicions for a few weeks now, but I am so irregular and I have felt so well. However …’ She shrugged, grinning impishly. ‘Today I thought I would make quite sure.’
‘And there’s no doubt?’
‘No, none at all.’ She drew away from him a little, looking at him curiously, aware for the first time that his reaction was not quite what she had expected. ‘What is the matter, Gavin? You are not annoyed, are you?’ The joy in her eyes had died, and her kittenlike face was suddenly wary. ‘You do not wish me to get rid of it, do you, mon amour?’ she asked, tilting her head a little to one side, the October sun gilding her sumptuous curls.
‘No!’ His reply was so outraged and emphatic that her eyes lit with laughter again. ‘Trés bien,’ she said, a husky chuckle deep in her voice. ‘Because I would not have done so, even if you had wanted me to. So … as you have no objection to me having our baby, perhaps you would tell me why you are looking so unhappy about news that I thought would delight you?’
‘I am delighted,’ he said, wishing that he could take her in his arms and pull her on to his knee. ‘Except—’ he hesitated awkwardly – ‘except I have news as well.’
‘Oh!’ She looked into his face and then slowly leaned back in her cane chair. ‘Je comprends. I understand. You are to go to Saigon?’
He nodded. ‘Almost immediately.’ He leaned across the metal-topped table, taking both her hands in his. ‘Gaby, I …’
He wanted to tell her that her news changed everything. That he would no longer be going. But he couldn’t. Vietnam was too important. As a journalist he was sickened by reading reports of fighting that had been filed by newsmen who had never left the comparative safety of Saigon, newsmen who did little more than repeat, verbatim, whatever statements were issued to them by the American command.
He wanted to do more. He wanted to get out into the countryside and to report on what he himself saw. He wanted to report the war from the Vietnamese standpoint as well as from the American. He wanted to discover for himself if the American view – that the war was essentially a conflict between Vietnamese and Vietnamese and that America was merely coining to the aid of a democratic government fighting to hold off the forces of communism – was accurate.
The letters he had seen from Nhu to Gabrielle’s mother had made him doubt the American argument. If the South Vietnamese government was a democracy, then it was not what he, or many other westerners, would recognize as a democracy. And if westerners were being misled about the true nature of the South Vietnamese government, then what other deceptions were being perpetrated? Whatever they were, he wanted the chance to discover them for himself. And to make them public.
‘Gaby, I …’ he began again, his eyes agonized.
She leaned toward him, silencing him with a kiss. ‘I know, mon amour,’ she said gently as she drew her mouth away from his. ‘You must go.�
�� Her eyes were bright with intensity. ‘And I want you to go. Talking about Vietnam with you these past few months has made me realize how very Vietnamese I am. When I think of home, I think of Saigon, not Montmartre. When I think of my relations, I think of Aunt Nhu and Dinh and my Vietnamese cousins, not of the distant members of my father’s family who never visit us or ask us to visit them.’
Grateful for her understanding, love for her swept over him like a tidal wave. For a brief, crazy second he was tempted to tell her that wild horses couldn’t drag him from her side, and then she said, her voice unexpectedly fierce, ‘Go to Vietnam for me, Gavin. Visit Nhu. Find out if what we are reading in the newspapers and seeing on the television is truth or propaganda. Write about things as they are, not as the Americans would like us to believe they are.’
‘There’s one thing we must do before I go,’ he said, knowing now that he would go. She looked at him questioningly, and he was amazed that the idea had never occurred to him before.
‘We have to get married,’ he said, enjoying the look of astonishment on her face.
‘But it is not necessary, mon amour,’ she protested. ‘Just because there is going to be a baby does not mean that—’
‘It is very necessary,’ he said firmly, rising to his feet and pulling her up. ‘And not because of the baby.’ He drew her into his arms, oblivious of the waiter who had come out to clear their table and of the indulgent glances of passersby. ‘It’s necessary because I love you, Gaby,’ he said thickly. ‘Because I could never live with anyone else. Because I want you to be my wife.’
She laughed up at him. ‘I have never thought of myself as a wife,’ she said teasingly but with truth. ‘But if you think I’ll make a good wife …’
‘You’ll make a wonderful wife,’ he said hoarsely, lowering his head to hers, kissing her passionately.
There was not enough time to arrange a church wedding. Gavin was to leave for Saigon on the following Friday and only with extreme difficulty was a wedding arranged at all.
White Christmas in Saigon Page 18
